


Of Dust and Shadow

by StopTalkingAtMe



Category: Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Genre: Gen, References to canonical character deaths, Thieves Guild Questline
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-23
Updated: 2020-02-23
Packaged: 2021-02-25 07:40:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,497
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22392469
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StopTalkingAtMe/pseuds/StopTalkingAtMe
Summary: When Karliah returns to Nightingale Hall after the death of Mercer Frey, the shadows are waiting to welcome her home.
Relationships: Karliah & Mercer Frey, Karliah & Nocturnal
Comments: 8
Kudos: 21
Collections: Chocolate Box - Round 5





	Of Dust and Shadow

**Author's Note:**

  * For [deathwailart](https://archiveofourown.org/users/deathwailart/gifts).



" _Pulvis et umbra sumus_ " _(We are but dust and shadow)_

– From _The Odes of Horace_

Prologue

When Karliah returns to Nightingale Hall she comes as a penitent, unarmed and wearing only a plain linen shirt and braies. It’s a meaningless gesture, and no one knows this better than her. Mercer would have laughed at her. Back in the days when he remembered how to laugh.

Everything has been made right, the Trinity restored, yet she cannot shake the feeling that this isn’t over. As she approaches, she finds the entrance to the Hall thronged with carrion birds, silent except for the occasional flurry of a crow ruffling its feathers. She feels as vulnerable as an animal with its throat bared. It’s a mistake to come back here alone.

But then again, she’s not sure she could have done it any other way.

Inside the braziers and torches remain unlit. The main chamber lies in darkness, and although the air is stirred by the ceaseless rushing water, there’s a hush as though the noise of a throng has died away the moment she stepped over the threshold.

She’s expecting the Hall to be empty, and for the two other members of the Trinity, bound to her now with ties older than any guild, to be absent.

It’s empty, but she isn’t alone.

It’s not Brynjolf and Marcus who are waiting for her, but _them_. Mercer and Gallus, alive once more and busy planning a heist. She sees them, just for a moment: shadows made flesh, black as ink and breaking apart at the edges. Gallus moves towards her with his dancer’s grace, while Mercer merely nods in greeting.

Karliah can recall this exact moment, remembers how at the time she thought, as Gallus swept her up into an embrace, how slow Mercer was to smile these days, how different he seemed. Not the man she remembered at all.

Could she have changed the paths their lives had taken, she wonders, if she’d only loved Mercer a little more, or Gallus a little less?

She closes her eyes. When she opens them again, there’s nothing there. Only the shadows welcoming her home.

i

After the Key was returned to the Sepulcher, she took the long way round. Rather than travel the breadth of Skyrim in the blink of an eye, borne on wings of shadow, she went by way of Solitude and a berth aboard a merchant ship bound for Windhelm. She’d steal plenty along the way, but any fool could have seen she was stalling for time.

The land that far north was bitter cold, absorbing little warmth from a sun bleached of colour and ringed by a reflected circle of light. No doubt Gallus could have told her exactly what atmospheric conditions were responsible for creating the effect. The icebergs glistened, pools of melted water shining sapphire-blue in their crags and hollows. Very nearly as beautiful as a jeweller’s carefully arranged display of precious gems, and Karliah, wrapped up tight against the cold, wished to all the gods that Gallus was there to see it and to distract her mind from painful memories of exile.

The disruption after the war had been a good time to lose herself, and in a way she’d done exactly that, retreating into numbed grief and donning a face that wasn’t hers, a trick her mother had taught her long ago. It was taboo magic, especially in Cyrodiil where the long-ago years of the Simulacrum had left their scars, and Karliah had little talent for spellcraft, but her natural eye colour was rare enough to mark her out, so instead of her violet eyes it was the common red-burning eyes of a Dunmer and a face grown wolfish with anger and grief.

It had been on a ship much like this one that she’d fled Skyrim, sailing to Solstheim and changing ships in Raven Rock. The alternative was Solitude, but she’d known for a fact that Mercer would have half a dozen spies ready and waiting by the time the ship docked.

From Raven Rock she’d sailed to Black Light, and from there down the Inner Sea to Ebonheart, and all the way she'd held her mother in her heart as she retraced the footsteps of a woman she'd never truly known. As the ship sailed past Scathing Bay, she stood on the deck with her face covered to protect her throat and lungs from the choking ash and saw from a distance what was left of the place where Lord Vivec’s holy city had once stood.

From Ebonheart she travelled inland through Morrowind to Cyrodiil, where she found a land left badly scarred by the War, the Imperial City hacked back in places to its skeleton of gleaming white elven bones.

She’d been there once before with Mercer, a long time before she’d ever heard more than whispers of the Nightingales, but if any of the thieves gathered in the shabby grandeur of their Waterfront guildhouse recognised her not one of them said a word.

It had been her first chance to learn how matters stood back in Skyrim, and it was much worse than she’d expected. A lot of people were dead, she was told, and the goblins were fighting over the bones.

"Ain’t no goblins in Skyrim," one of the thieves commented. He’d been eyeing her up, drunk, but with a still watchfulness that made her uneasy. He might even have been one of the thieves they’d spoken to that night, the tale-teller who’d kept Mercer entranced with his tales of men who could turn into mist and moonlight, of a thief who stole from his god purely because he _could_.

"Who’s running the guild now?" she asked, her voice casual, like it was purely curiosity that led her to ask the question. Keeping her hunger hidden. Hoping he’d name Brynjolf or Delvin, but she already knew there wasn’t a chance in Oblivion that Nocturnal would allow matters to end that way.

Mercer Frey. Of course.

For a long time, killing him was all she could think of. Her bitter heart hardened until it felt like blood-made-stone, a crushing weight of ebony in her chest. Every time she laid her head down to sleep she never knew if she’d wake to find Mercer’s shadow looming over her and his knife at her throat. And she’d wonder as she lay tangled in her sweat-drenched sheets whether _he_ ever dreamed of her. Whether _he_ ever woke gasping in terror, with his heart pounding against the inside of his ribs, still feeling the cold kiss of her blade against his skin and knowing she’d be coming for him sooner or later.

She hoped to all the gods he did.

ii

The echoes carried strangely through the corridors and chambers of Nightingale Hall. She half-fancied she could follow the course of the water as it sprung out of the rock, fresh and clear, sweet as snow melt, and plunged back down into the hidden places where no light had ever shone. There were tunnels in this mountain, Gallus had told her, where no torch would burn, where the light was stifled before it had a chance to push back the shadows. Places which belonged entirely to Nocturnal and to the murk.

After they’d taken the oath, Brynjolf had returned to Riften to prepare for the journey to Irkngthand to hunt down Mercer. She’d known he would: he was, as he had always been, the heart of the guild, and he’d have plenty of work to keep him busy for a while. But she also knew – and wasn’t sure if Brynjolf was even aware of it – that there was more to it than that. He had spent the last twenty-five years thinking she’d murdered his guildmaster, after all, so she could understand if his feelings about her were still a little bit complicated. He’d need a while to get his head in order.

She’d expected Marcus to leave too, but instead he stayed for a while to explore the extensive building, trying to determine, perhaps, just what it was he’d gotten himself into. He slunk back just when she’d sat down to eat, combing cobwebs from his hair and startling her because she’d started to think he’d left without telling her. He’d already changed out of his Nightingale armour, she noted, and she wasn’t quite certain what to make of that.

She gestured for him to join her, and he did, accepting a bottle of ale and sinking down into the seat opposite with a gleam in his eyes. "This place is unbelievable," he said. "How deep does it go into the mountains?"

"I don’t know," she admitted. "I’m not sure anyone knows. Gallus told me he tried to map it once, but either the tunnels kept changing or he kept making mistakes."

He made a soft sound deep in his throat, lifting his gaze from the plate of bread and cheese on the table for long enough to meet her eyes. "From what I’ve heard, that doesn’t sound like him."

Karliah slid the plate across the table to him, smiling at his pretended expression of chagrin and at how little time it took him to start helping himself.

"It isn’t," she said. What she didn’t say was that she couldn’t be certain how much of the story was true. No one ever knew with Gallus.

"I wish I could have met him."

"You would have liked him," she said. "Everybody did."

Nothing but the truth. Gallus had always had a knack of putting people at their ease, and Marcus was a fellow Imperial; they shared a common history and culture. Gallus would have delighted in him.

A knot of grief tightened in her throat, and still Marcus kept watching her with his dark, speculative eyes. But _that_ was a road she’d been down before, and a mistake she was damned well not going to make a second time around.

So instead she thought of Snow Veil Sanctum and of finally laying Gallus to rest. Of the crisp sound of snow crunching beneath her boots, the lingering taint of the poison on her hands, so long to develop and perfect, a year's work wasted in an instant.

It was the first chance she’d had to talk with Marcus of matters other than Mercer Frey and when the ache in her throat had eased she asked him how he’d fallen into the life.

There was an odd lilt to his accent that reminded her strangely of her mother, so it didn’t surprise her that he’d grown up in Cheydinhal, where the Dunmer influence had grown even stronger since the Red Year. His nurse had been a Dunmer refugee from Balmora with ties to the much reduced House Hlaalu, and his father – this announced with a heavy sense of irony – had been captain of the City Guard and a deeply honourable man.

"Not the kind of man to be proud of having a thief for a son?"

He gave her a pained smile, his jaw tight. "I thank the gods every day that he never fucking found out."

Well, she supposed, it wasn’t like he was the first thief to have had a complicated relationship with his parents.

"’The Law is Sacred’," Marcus continued. He’d caught a Septim between his first two fingers and was twisting it so that it caught the candlelight. "My father believed that with all his heart."

"What do you believe?"

"Me?" He flashed his teeth and clenched his fist around the coin. "Nothing’s sacred. Least of all the _law_."

Something about the abruptness of his movement set the candle flame to guttering. The shadows flocked around the table, scattered across the walls like ravens bursting into flight.

Marcus was watching her again. Thinking about his oath, perhaps, trying to determine just to what extent she’d used him and Brynjolf, and how much he could trust her.

Karliah was in half in a mood to tell him that he shouldn’t trust her at all, any more than he should have trusted Mercer, or anyone else in the Guild, and that she certainly meant never to trust anyone to that extent ever again. But her heart wasn’t in it. Truth was, it felt good to have people at her back once more, Bryn, with his experience and savvy, and Marcus whose joy in the life had reignited hers. The gods knew that had been a long time coming, and she welcomed it.

"What happened?" he asked quietly, not looking at her as he spoke, but at the coin. "Between you and Mercer?"

"What did Mercer tell you?"

He hesitated, darted a glance her way. "He said that you were partners."

 _Partners_.

"Well," she said, "that’s one way to put it, I suppose."

iii

‘One step ahead’, Mercer had scrawled on the wall in Irkngthand, and she’d never forget those words. She had wanted to be the one to kill him – it was her duty as Gallus’s lover, as a Nightingale, as a follower of Nocturnal – but in the end it had been Marcus who’d wielded the knife, and once more she’d merely been the observer.

Her mind had been subsumed in the desperate fight against Bryn, clouded with rage and grief and pain.

Talons clawing at the inside of her heart. The taste of iron in her mouth. Shadows bleeding at the edge of her vision.

Brynjolf slammed her bodily into the wall, crushed the breath out of her with his weight. With the last of her strength she hooked her foot behind his ankle, trying to overbalance him, and just as the darkness rose up to claim her, the vice-like grip on her heart and mind released.

Bryn’s fist, clenched in her hair, loosened. "Lass?"

 _It’s Mercer,_ she thought. _Shadows take him._ And she told herself that the emotion pressing against the inside of her ribs was triumph.

She pulled away, hauling herself to her feet, and saw Marcus below, a body crumpled before him and the opalescent glimmer of their prize in his hands.

"So it’s over then," Brynjolf said, his voice thick with an emotion she couldn’t read.

An ominous rumble ran through the chamber, making the ground shake and the pipes overhead rattle. Karliah looked up, eyeing them uneasily.

"Not yet."

Afterwards, she’d recall that image of Mercer’s body. She’d felt him die, and now it really was over: the conduit to the Evergloam had been reopened and all had put right, but still she didn’t feel like she could stop running.

_One step ahead._

Maybe things would have been different if she’d been the one to kill him. Maybe then she might actually have been able to believe he was actually dead.

And even so, she was glad it hadn’t been her. Too much history between them, too many obligations on either side. She suspected Brynjolf felt the same way. It was better this way, even if it meant she’d never get her answers. Even if it meant she’d never know whether Mercer had gone to Snow Veil Sanctum planning to kill Gallus, or if he’d believed, right until the last, that he might be able to win Gallus to his cause.

But if that was the case then he'd never really known Gallus at all.

iv

She almost had been the one to kill him. Nine years after fleeing Skyrim, Karliah had returned to Riften with the sole intention of killing Mercer Frey.

It took her a while – and almost all her coin: invisibility potions were expensive – to track him down and learn his habits. He led a mostly underground existence by then, hidden in the sewers that riddled the city, avoiding open spaces where an archer could get a decent shot. He knew her too well.

But she’d learned some new tricks in her time away, and she was angry, flooded with so much rage she was practically drunk on it, and she was used by now to the unpredictable quirks of luck outside of the influence of the Lady of Shadows, enough to trust nothing to chance. Yet another thing that had been stolen from her, the charmed life she’d led as a thief who walked protected by Nocturnal’s shadows.

Judging by the look of Mercer when she finally managed to hunt him down, she wasn’t the only one whom luck had deserted.

She found him seated at a desk, writing in a ledger, and it took her by surprise how old he looked. His skin was pallid and waxy, his shoulders hunched. Anger had carved its grooves around his eyes and mouth.

When was the last time he’d seen the sky, she wondered. How much time had he spent hiding in these tunnels like a skeever, living with his fear and guilt?

She’d come here to kill him, but felt instead an unexpected pang of something that surely could not be pity, not for this bastard who’d stolen everything from her and whom she’d spent the best part of a decade hating. He looked tired and miserable, and still she unsheathed her dagger, tipped with a deadly poison made from jarrin root.

Karliah couldn’t match Mercer in a fair fight, but she’d spent years of planning to ensure that this would be _nothing_ like a fair fight; she’d cheat just as he had, butcher him in cold blood the same way he had Gallus. She’d rip at him with teeth and nails if it came to that, even if she too had to die, and their Trinity finally die with her.

Mercer stilled and lifted his head towards the vaulted ceiling as if searching for the sky.

The shadows thickened around her, gathered up like folds of black velvet. Her skin flooded hot, then cold, and she sensed what seemed to her at that moment a familiar presence: Gallus, standing so close behind her, she could feel his lips against her cheek. A breeze warmed her hair like an exhaled breath.

_This isn’t the way, Karliah._

Silently, with the awareness of a matter left undone weighing heavy on her heart, Karliah slipped away.

It hadn’t been Gallus, of course, although she’d only come to realise that much later. When her blood-lust had been tempered and she was far enough away from Riften that the temptation to return and finish the job had eased. Gallus’s spirit would have been stranded in the Sepulchre, a long way from the embrace of the shadows. Even further from her.

Not Gallus, but the work of Nocturnal, making sure Karliah heard what she wanted to hear, saw what she wanted to see. Just enough to nudge her off one path and onto the one her patron had chosen for her.

Probably for the best.

It wasn’t even that she gave a damn about murder. She’d had plenty of blood on her hands by then: Mercer’s brief hesitation in the aftermath of the murder had bought her a little time before she’d escaped – enough to sow the seeds of dissent amongst the members of the guild whom she judged to be the most dangerous – and a lot of throats had been cut before Mercer managed to bring the guild under his control. If she had blood on her hands, it was from that act, that quiet dripping of poison into the hearts of her fellow thieves. Maybe there was more of Morrowind in her than she’d realised, for all that she was Skyrim-born. She’d done what she had to in order to survive, so it wasn’t like she’d have baulked at killing Mercer. Except…

Except that if she did murder him she’d never get her answers. Like why he’d done what he’d done, and _how_ he could have done it. More importantly, she’d never clear her name with the guild, and she’d spend the rest of her life looking over her shoulder, waiting for their vengeance to catch up with her. She was damned good, but sooner or later she’d slip up, and she’d had a feeling that what was left of her luck was very quickly running out.

Afterwards, in the ruins of an abandoned cottage, the idea was born, not to kill him, but to bring him to justice before the guild and let them judge him. She dismissed it as impossible at first: the proof she’d need was lost forever in Snow Veil Sanctum with Gallus’s body, but gradually an idea began to take form, shaping itself into something that looked very much like a plan.

Epilogue

She’s been avoiding the Oath Chamber, but she cannot stay away any longer.

Here the darkness is so thick she cannot see the edges of the room or the ground below as she crosses to the plinth where she knelt in supplication not so very long ago. It feels like a lifetime, the memory confused with the first time she swore her soul away. She was so angry then, furious with her mother, with Gallus, with Mercer, and with herself most of all, for not having seen the pattern that seemed so obvious in retrospect. Her mother had died for the god she’d truly believed in all her life, masked by her perfunctory worship of the Reclamations, and tor the first time, all the fragments that Karliah had spent her life trying to piece together finally made a kind of sense.

The shadows are rising. It’s so dark in the chamber now that it makes no difference if she closes her eyes or not. She could well believe that she’s back there in the Twilight Sepulcher, feeling the tug of the Evergloam in her heart.

Karliah doesn’t pray. She never has. It’s better not to seek out the attention of the Daedric Lords unless you desperately need to or unless you have something of value to offer them. She knows that prayer is as meaningless as treating her return to Nightingale Hall like an act of pilgrimage, and that she’s as much a fool in her own way as the priests who built the Pilgrim’s Path. But that’s the strange thing about belief: it’s not always what the gods think about it that matters.

Nocturnal does not trouble herself to manifest. Instead her voice seems one with the shadows, rich and ever-so-slightly mocking. Not heard as such, but felt, scratching at the inside of Karliah’s skull, vibrating in the cavity of her chest. Like birds – _ravens_ – battering against the inside of her ribs. It weaves itself around her, threading through the darkness as though binding her to the stone.

_Are you troubled, Karliah?_

She wants to say no. What could be troubling her now, after all, when everything has been made right? Mercer is dead, the Trinity restored, and Gallus has been avenged. And so damned what if she never gets her answers? If she’ll never now know _why_. She wants to say no. But she can’t.

"Yes, My Lady."

_I do hope you’re not going to disappoint me again._

"I wasn’t planning on it, My Lady," she says, but she can hear how weak her voice sounds, how the shadows seem to swallow it up, and she can sense Nocturnal too, coiled like smoke around her, part of the air that Karliah takes in with every breath. On her skin, on her lips and tongue, in her lungs and heart, the same way she's always been. "But I’m afraid that I may fail you again, even so."

It’s as if the chamber exhales around her. The air shivers, a chill breeze brushing against her cheeks, stirring her hair.

 _All mortals fail_ , her lady says. _It’s in your nature_. _All is as it should be. For now._

It isn’t much of an answer, although she knows she’s lucky to get even that, no matter how crushing it is, this expectation of her failure. As little as Karliah likes to admit it, Nocturnal is probably right. She thinks of Marcus, and of how he reminds her not only of Gallus, but of Mercer too. He’s unpredictable in the same way; she can never tell what he’s thinking, or where his heart truly lies.

She was afraid when she brought them here to take the oath, a fear she couldn’t take the time to examine too closely because to falter would be to fall. At the time she thought it down to her concern that one or both of them would refuse, that their misgivings would prove stronger than their greed, but now she wonders. Because if she can’t see how she could have stopped it from happening the first time, then how can she think herself capable of stopping it from happening again?

 _You have done well, Karliah,_ Nocturnal says. _Despite your… many failures._

Karliah swallows down the rest of her questions. It seems she has more of them than ever, but she probably should have expected that. "Thank you, My Lady."

It may not be much, but it’s _enough_. It'll have to be.

She thinks of the abandoned shack where the plan to bring Mercer to justice before the guild first began to develop. How much of it was her own idea and how much Nocturnal’s influence, she’d never know for certain.

Not that it matters.

 _Nocturnal doesn't care about you,_ Mercer said. As though that was a bad thing. As though Karliah wasn’t raised by her mother to worship the Reclamations, however half-heartedly, and murder, deceit, and manipulation were always the cornerstones of their faith. And as though she didn’t see for herself in Scathing Bay how little the lives of mortals mean to the gods (her mother never did entirely come around to the teachings of the New Temple – to Dralsi, Lord Vivec was, and always would be, divine).

Mercer never understood. Nor did Gallus, really: his oath to Nocturnal was always a practical thing, born of academic curiosity and naked greed.

It’s different for her. It always has been. She spent most of her childhood cradled in the embrace of shadows, entangled in her mother’s carefully spun web of lies and half-truths. Karliah believes in a way that the others never did, not Brynjolf or Marcus, and not Mercer and Gallus before them, either. She believes in a way they’d disapprove of; in a way, she suspects, that _Nocturnal_ would disapprove of, but then faith always was a hard thing to shake.

And if there’s one thing Karliah has, it’s faith.

She feels curiously weightless, unable to feel the stone on which she kneels, as if she’s borne aloft on an ocean of darkness. The darkness ebbs around her, and it feels like feathers brushing against her skin, like a sense of amusement and approval.

It’s a gift, something precious to be cherished, and for a few all-too-brief moments, Karliah knows that no matter what happens next and no matter what might be coming, for the first time in a long while, luck is on her side.


End file.
